One should beware of throwing away national characters, but the mystery of Henri Pick still feels very French. In a positive way only. A puzzle-maker without murder or criminal perpetrator, a "who dunned" about the origin of a novel: Who has written that suggestive book about the Russian author Pushjin and his love life, which takes France by storm?
It begins in a small library in Brittany that has a room of importance for unpublished literature, where a young, ambitious publisher at the great Paris publisher finds a manuscript that beats her with amazement. A few months later, the book is a bestseller and on everyone's lips, not least when the person who wrote it is a now dead pizza baker, named Henri Pick, who according to his surprised family has never written more texts than his menus.
The publisher and the alleged author's wife and daughter may be part of French television's Babel, which is led by the host and literary critic Jean-Michel, whose statements on literature can help or steal a writer. He dares to question the origin of the work, live broadcasting, which costs him the job and, by extension, his marriage. Determined to get fix, he sets out to solve the riddle of pizza baker Pick.
The mystery Henri Pick is wonderfully literary and a little out of date, but there is a contemporary feeling that a well-known white middle-aged cultural man is forced to step aside in favor of a young Afro-French girl, who thus takes over the program. But that is just one detail among many, in a film that focuses on the timeless question of how the provenance of a work affects our perception of it.
If there is a cape here, it is aimed at the commercial, against winning entrepreneurs and proposed PR types who manipulate the media, and the truth, to sell some more. But most of all, it is a cultured and friendly intellectual trifle that gives hope for intelligent life in the cultural industry. There are those who struggle tirelessly, says the film, even though the power is too great - not unlike Asterix and his brave grilles who refuse to let the occupants into the same northwest corner of France.
It is the rubber face Fabrice Luchini (who, incidentally, played Caesar in just one Asterix movie, and acted with great credibility in the screwed-up Mystery in Slack Bay) that makes the single-minded programmer, and he has as usual full control of all his little facial muscles; lets them stretch out various conflicting feelings as well.
Camille Cottin makes Pick's daughter who, first reluctantly, assists Jean-Michel - even an actor with many faces. Is perhaps the very best as a hot star agent in the TV series with the silly Swedish title Call my agent - where, by the way, French favorite Fabrice Luchini plays herself.